Why Digital Services are the Key to Quick and Scalable Asset Reliability

The current pandemic has forced industrial facilities to operate leaner than ever. Many of the facilities that provide our energy, water, medical devices, food, and other necessities have had to cut staff hours while maintaining capacity. They now face unprecedented pressure to expedite operational improvement. Is there a fast-track to meeting their needs?

Through our work at Augury, helping to transform the operations of industrial facilities, we find that the foundation of speedy operational improvement is full-scale asset reliability. Why? Because closing the gaps in mechanical insight – resolving mechanical inefficiencies and eliminating unexpected failures – enables facilities to reimagine their operation in an entirely planned (predictive) environment.

Developing a fully predictive environment means maintaining continuous insight into the running condition of every critical machine. And even with advanced technologies at play, achieving that requires substantial human resources and time. So, with those resources severely limited, how can facilities establish and maintain asset reliability? They can do this by outsourcing and implementing a digital machine health service.

Technology-driven subscription services are all the rage in some market segments. But when it comes to asset reliability in the industrial market, we see a strong desire among many organizations to purchase new technologies and own the means of improvement. And while technology is a powerful tool toward scaling reliability, the implementation of products, alone, does not make a significant operational impact.

An organization can install hardware, collect data, and have analysts evaluate that data to generate insights. But driving meaningful change requires doing this efficiently, at scale, which involves purchasing more hardware and hiring more analysts. Most important is implementing and maintaining these pieces in a way that’s conducive to action and change management. When we speak with industrial organizations building their own digital machine health programs, they often lament being stalled, paralyzed by mountains of data and resource constraints.

Because of our reliance on humans – mechanical experts – to improve machine health, asset maintenance has always been a predominantly service-oriented business. Likewise, building an effective digital machine health solution is almost entirely about people and service. It requires education, support, feedback, and continuous improvement. All of these functions necessitate dedicated human resources and expertise, whether those resources are in-house or outsourced. In other words, asset reliability is a competency, not a product, and it’s typically outside an industrial organization’s core capability.

Our experience shows that organizations achieving asset reliability at scale value outcomes over ownership. By utilizing a full-service subscription model to improve asset reliability, facilities quickly gain the benefit of the outcomes, while maintaining focus on what they do best. The fast-track to scalable asset reliability is digital machine health as a service. All you need to do is subscribe.